bfwebster - Slashdot User

Submission + - Microsoft internal e-mails show dismay with Vista (brucefwebster.com)

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bfwebster

on Thursday February 28, 2008 @12:26PM

bfwebster writes: "Microsoft is currently facing a class-action suit over its designation of allegedly under-powered hardware as being "Vista Capable." The discovery process of that lawsuit has now compelled Microsoft to produce some internal e-mails discussing those issues. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has published extracts of some of those e-mails, along with a link to a PDF file containing a more extensive e-mail exchange.

The e-mails reflect a lot of frustration among senior Microsoft personnel about Vista's performance problems and hardware incompatibilities. They also appear to indicate that Microsoft lowered the hardware requirements for "Vista Capable" in order to include certain lower-end Intel chipsets, apparently as a favor to Intel: "In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with 915 graphics embedded." Read the whole PDF; it is informative, interesting, and at time (though unintentionally) funny. ..bruce.."

Submission + - Subway sues Quiznos over user-generated ads (brucefwebster.com)

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bfwebster

on Tuesday January 29, 2008 @04:49PM

bfwebster writes: "The New York Times has a lengthy article ("Can a Sandwich Be Slandered?") about a lawsuit that Subway filed against Quiznos for running a contest requesting user-generated video ads that "depict Quiznos sandwiches as 'superior' to Subway's." The ads, of course, largely ignored the usual broadcast rules regarding truth and fairness in advertising, hence the lawsuit. As the article notes, if Subway is successful in its suit, this will pretty much kill most future requests by such companies for user-made video, which may end up generating more ill will towards Subway than the original commercials did. I'm not sure that Subway has grasped the concept of a Pyrrhic victory."

Submission + - Google Earth visualizations of San Diego fires (and-still-i-persist.com)

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bfwebster

on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @03:55PM

bfwebster writes: "Bruce Henderson, who lives in northwestern Escondido and so is pretty much right in the middle of most of the San Diego County fires, has been posting a series of Google Earth visualizations of specific wildfire sites to what happened, what's happening, and what may yet happen. Examples include: the Witch Creek Fire; the Rice Canyon Fire; the Poomacha (Mt. Palomar) Fire (scroll down past the flat map); and the Harris Fire (scroll down past the photo). (Full disclosure: he and I are co-bloggers, but don't let that keep you from looking at his work.) There's plenty of other coverage of the fires as well."

Submission + - 21st Century Cloning in China (and-still-i-persist.com)

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bfwebster

on Thursday August 09, 2007 @08:21PM

bfwebster writes: "Popular Science has a fascinating article on the wholesale cloning of manufactured goods in China. It starts off with the investigation of a possible iPhone clone that claims to have more functionality and flexibility than the iPhone, but then goes into the vast enterprises dedicated to manufacturing goods that appear to be from established companies. For example, here's a cloned car:

The QQ is a part-for-part reproduction of a car known, depending on where it is sold, as the Chevy Spark or the Daewoo Matiz (the genuine vehicle is built as part of a joint venture between General Motors and the Korean company). Sparks are sold all over the world — in the U.S., an upgraded $10,500 variant called the Aveo is cheaper than any other car you can buy. But when the $5,000 QQ first appeared in 2003, GM — and American officials — were astonished. "If you didn't have name tags on the cars, you couldn't tell them apart," said Congressman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin after a 2004 trip to China. "It's such a good knockoff that you can pull the door off the Spark and it fits on the QQ, so close that the seals on the doors match right up."

In some cases, the author notes, the cloners build "shadow factories — identical plants, often constructed from the same blueprints legitimate manufacturers used to launch their ventures." In other cases, they attempted to clone the organization of the firm whose products there were cloning. A fascinating article — reads like something out of Neal Stephenson or William Gibson. ..bruce.."

Submission + - The Art of 'Ware [v. 2.0] available online (free)

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bfwebster

on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @04:29PM

bfwebster writes: "Back in 1995, I published The Art of 'Ware , a reinterpretation of Sun Tzu's The Art of War as applied to developing and marketing technology. I am now updating it (version 2.0) and have the entire book posted , free and public, on my blog. I am particularly interested in replacing and/or supplementing my own commentary with that of others; see here for details. ..bruce.."

Submission + - NeXTSTEP 4.2 running on an Intel MacPro

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bfwebster

on Saturday October 07, 2006 @10:01PM

bfwebster writes: "My co-blogger, Bruce Henderson, talks about his latest project:

About a month ago, I got a divorce from most use of Windows XP in my daily life — that is to say I purchased a gleaming new MacPro tower with 4 Xeon cores in it. I still have to use XP for a few things (Visio) but I can now run a virtual XP session in this software called Parallels. This thing is fast! No no, I am sure you read that elsewhere... But here is the interesting bit. When NeXT was in its "brown dwarf" stage, on the way to being consumed by their famous black hole, they decided to port their OS to all manner of processors.

I was working at NeXT at the time, and it was so cool that what everyone else hoped to do one day, we could pull off with some changes to the Mach kernel and a bunch of debugging. One of the target platforms was Intel 486 and Pentium computers.

So now I have old CDs of NeXTStep Intel, and Parallels, and a "Faster Than Light" MacPro... what does an old NXHack do?

In all, he needed less than two hours to get NeXTSTEP 4.2 up and running on his new Intel-based MacPro, using Parallels. Screenshot included."

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